


Tourist Trail

by brutti_ma_buoni



Category: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England - Ian Mortimer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 21:23:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutti_ma_buoni/pseuds/brutti_ma_buoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian doesn't love his time travel guide job. But it has compensations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tourist Trail

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kaesa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesa/gifts).



> As a second Yuletide gift for my recip. Hope one or other or both pleases you!
> 
>  
> 
> NB This isn't really RPF, though Ian Mortimer and Nicholas Orme are both real people who do live in and around Exeter.

Exeter again. Ian sighed. It was all very well, and he was pretty much a naturalised Devonian after so many years. But he was getting rather sick of the city walls. There was a little bit of Fore Street where the puddles were so deep they had a habit of sucking footwear off from unwary travellers. And his groups were always unwary. 

He looked back at them. Five, this time, which was better than the time they'd sent him here with 24 French people on a coach trip round the West Country. They'd landed in 1415, which could have gone better. Not quite as bad as the glitch that had taken the unvaccinated honeymoon couple back to the worst of the Black Death, but nonetheless, more strenuous than any sensible person would regard as a regular job. 

This group would blend a little better, and the chronometer said they had landed smoothly in 1423, no surprises. Good. Ian looked at them, nodded, and said, "Right chaps, are we all serene? Remember: don't frighten the natives."

They chuckled. Which was all very well for them, but they weren't the ones who continually had strangers teleported in undercover from six centuries ahead to sneer at their sanitary arrangements. The more groups Ian brought, the more he disliked his own time. The sheer number of iPods he had confiscated in the last five years alone… Humans were idiots. Or modern humans were. Medieval humans had a slightly better grasp of how weird and random the world was and how little they understood their own part in it. 

I mean, look at me, Ian periodically thought. I time travel on a weekly basis. No fucking clue how. Just a job for a freelance historian. Who am I to suggest we can know anything about anything? 

He spotted a transgression. "Um, Professor? Just to mention, lose the specs, okay?"

"But I-" 

Honestly. Every time. Ruddy great NHS frames and Nicholas Orme was a retiring professor of medieval history so should know better just how inappropriate that was. This little jaunt was mostly for the Professor's benefit, a chance to see his beloved hometown as he had studied and imagined it. They had agreed that it would be unsporting for him to base too much published research on what he found, but Ian knew perfectly well the Professor would sneak something in, somehow. They always did. It was never just about the _SIGHTS SOUNDS AND SMELLS OF THE DARK AGES!_ TM Not really. 

At least this lot didn’t look like they were looking for a knight in shining armour. The terrifyingly ill-informed girls he'd dragged back from one of the round table meetings at Winchester, screaming, while Edward III's court looked on in baffled politeness, leavened only by the baying of their hounds, still lived in Ian's memory. Not in a good way. 

"Yes. Specs off. Best medieval feet forward, hmm?" He tried to jolly the party along. They really rather needed to get inside the city before the gates closed, and given the guards' propensity for troublemaking that wasn't quite such a given as the comfortable 90 minutes breathing space to sunset might appear. 

It was Robert on the gate. Again. Damn. 

Not that Robert wasn't pleasant. He was. Perfectly amiable. Chatty, even. Which was nice, in a guard. Much better than sullen and probing. Except for the fact that Robert was amiably _curiously_ chatty. He liked Ian. He liked Ian's guests. He liked to know more about them. 

Robert was _interested_ you see. Interested. And the guests were not (as a rule) trained actors. Nor medievalists, Professor Orme notwithstanding. Questioned in late Middle English, in the south western dialect, they became confused. And conspicuous. 

Ian pushed to the head of the little group. "Robert! Lovely to see you, old bean. How's tricks?"*

"What up! More loonies, is it?"

"I'm afraid so. Let's hope old Sidwell works her usual magic, what? I mean, they are deep believers, of course-" a courteous gesture there, to the group, not least because he was pretty sure Nicholas Orme could understand every other word at minimum. "But it does get a trifle wearing, don't you know? Nutters and easterners. Can't understand what they're saying half the time. And anyone would think they'd never seen a monastery before. Or a shithouse." Well, that was his story, and sometimes it worked. 

The coarseness did its job; Robert guffawed and nodded them through. Ian wondered, not for the first time, how long it would be before Robert put together all the truly odd things about Ian's guest/pilgrims and realised that something was wrong with the world he knew. Most likely if Ian got dropped on the same day twice, with a different party each time, and some fool with an iPod shuffle clipped on in one group (yes, that had happened before – bloody small and forgettable, those things, less culpable than the usual items accidentally brought). With luck, no one would be burned at the stake, as such. Though it was of course legal, hereabouts, for heresy and generally being a bad egg. Or spying for the French, come to that, though spies tended to have a more gutsy and less smoky end. Ugh. 

(Ian pondered, again not for the first time, whether he would ever have any luck persuading the company to change this 'generic-medieval-visit' date to about 50 years earlier, before any nasty heretic-burning statutes got passed. The firm, though, tended to prefer a buffer of over half a century each way from the big hit of the Black Death. Otherwise the insurers got twitchy, given the imprecision of the chronometers. Even this far off, it didn't always go quite to plan.)

"Off to the hotel, then, chaps," he said, cheerfully. Not that it was a hotel, and they knew that, and they had promised to be good about the beds. And the loos. And the food. They wouldn't be. They never were. But at least they couldn’t say it hadn’t been mentioned in the brochure. (The brochure was quite thick these days; not with choice, but with disclaimers.) 

They walked up to Carfax. Even Ian couldn't entirely lose the shiver that seeing South Street in its pomp gave him. No crappy pound shops, but merchants up from the quay, the city's window on the wider world. Last but one time he'd been here, there had been a Turkey merchant in harbour, due to bad storms, poor navigation, and the fact Ian had landed a good forty years later than planned, once cautious overtures were being made to the Ottomans of Istanbul. The city had been alive with excitement, buying up half the cargo direct, not letting it go to London or Southampton, to be carved up by middlemen for double profits. No such luck this time, but it was bustling enough to please and distract. The two students had their heads together, delighted. The accountant on his holidays was craning his neck at the couple of armed retainers passing by (he usually did battle reenactments, apparently, but had just turned fifty and was treating himself). The elderly widow – Marjorie Kempe, of all things, though she'd said it with enough of a twinkle that Ian hadn't worried too much about his spit-take and chuckle – looked as though she mostly wanted to sit down for a while. The Professor, though, was looking with longing at-

"No, Professor," said Ian, trying to sound stern. He understood all too well what Orme wanted next. And the first few times Ian had been this way himself, he'd been the same. The great monuments of Exeter are, in the 21st century, not in great condition. The castle is fragmentary, the city walls have mostly gone. But the cathedral is still there. And Orme was an expert on the cathedral and its old surroundings - had studied them for forty years, indeed, and was now stepping away for quiet retirement in Penge. This was his last fling, and Ian was tempted to indulge him.

But no. Ian had a party to look after. He couldn't simply indulge a scholar, even a hugely respected one. "To the Turk's Head," he said, and led the way up the High Street. Once inside, he tipped the wink to Sam, and with deep relief said, "Safe now. You can talk. Suggest we take half an hour to relax, then go out to enjoy the atmosphere, okay?"

Sam grinned. He didn't really believe they were time travellers, but he didn't care what the truth was when the money was good. One of those rare, valuable contacts the firm had who simply didn't give a toss, and who believed you less the more honest you were with them. He even overlooked the fact Ian turned up randomly in his timeline looking exactly the same age, wholly incurious. Bless him. He also boiled water for them to drink, kept a first aid box hidden in a chest, and had a stash of charged batteries for emergencies, swapped out with every trip. They really couldn't do without Sam. It was just a shame his place was such a pit. 

Although, Ian mused half an hour later, it had its advantages. Without watches and digital timepieces in general, his trippers could be distinctly dilatory at times. But not usually at the Turk's Head. Nobody longed to linger. Even Mrs Kempe, though she looked tired, had got herself together in good time. 

"Well chaps," said Ian. "This is the first, perhaps the most exciting, set piece of our trip. The cathedral, in the evening light. It will surprise you, even if you know Exeter well-" He bowed to Orme, briefly, then felt like a tit for doing so. But it wasn't often he guided a scholar who truly knew the minutiae; it made him feel a little vulnerable. Then again, there was pride. Without Ian and the firm, Orme's knowledge of medieval Exeter would have remained confined to page and imagination. Whereas-

"Are you ready? Let's go." And he led the five 'pilgrims' toward the cathedral close. He always liked to take them in via St Stephen, on the grounds it survived into the twenty-first century, so anyone who knew Exeter was lulled by familiarity before being startled by the new. 

Or, more accurately, the old. 

Here they were. The cathedral's west front, almost unchanged at first sight. Then they could take in the sharpness of the sculpture, the figures complete. The ancillary buildings, and stalls in the close. The great parish church of St Mary Major, long gone in the now. 

It was barely half an hour before sunset. The close would be closing, so to speak. But Ian wanted to give his travellers this, before the long painful night at the Turk's Head, when the pottage and the fleas and the bedding would cause endless complaints. This was the wonder; this was why he did it. That, and the fact Ian would never see this himself, without the damn tourists. And it was worth it.

 

 

 

* These are of course not the precise words Ian used. He knows better, and no timetravel guide is allowed to act without a thorough grounding in the local language. Nonetheless, for clarity and ease of reading, this tale has modernised language.


End file.
